Overview

Google Chart Tools (aka Google Visualization API) enables you to create beautiful charts easily, something that's useful for any dashboard design.
You just have to write JavaScript in your views, and a Google chart magically appears in your rendered view.

This Ruby gem, GoogleVisualr, is a wrapper around the Google Chart Tools that allows anyone to create the same beautiful charts with just Ruby;
you don't have to write any JavaScript at all. Good for any Ruby on Rails setup whereby you prefer to work your logic in models or controllers.

The Gist

Configure your chart with any of the options as listed in Google Chart Tools' API Docs.

In your view, invoke a chart.to_js(div_id) method and that will magically generate and insert JavaScript into the final HTML output.

You get your awesome Google chart, and you didn't write any JavaScript!

Limitations

GoogleVisualr is created solely for the aim of simplifying the display of a chart, and not the interactions.

Hence, do note that GoogleVisualr is not a 100% complete wrapper for Google Chart Tools.

For example, Methods and Events as described in Google Chart Tools' API Docs, for use after a chart has been rendered, are not implemented
because they felt more native being written as JavaScript functions, within views or .js files.

Install

Assuming you are on Rails 3, include the gem in your Gemfile.

gem "google_visualr", "~> 2.5.1"

Basics

This section describes a basic implementation of the GoogleVisualr::DataTable and GoogleVisualr::AreaChart classes.

Contribution and Support

The source of GoogleVisualr is available on GitHub. Please feel free to fork the project, make improvements or bug fixes and submit pull requests.
Ideally, all pull requests should also come with tests!